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Kathleen Wynne gets sworn in as premier on Monday and immediately starts preparing the speech from the throne that will open the legislature Feb. 19. She should read — and have her cabinet colleagues as well as her staff and theirs read — Barack Obama’s second inaugural address. It championed activist government within the framework of fiscal responsibility.

“A great nation must care for the vulnerable . . . A country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it . . . Every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity . . . Our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts.”

It was an unapologetic statement of liberal principles, the first such from a Democratic president in decades. Republicans had made liberalism such a dirty word that John Kerry, labelled a liberal during his 2004 presidential run, said: “It’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

A similar, though less severe, obeisance to right-wing orthodoxy took hold in Canada as well, its prime example being Dalton McGuinty signing a pledge to the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation in 2003 that he would not raise taxes. It was a promise he could not, did not, keep.

Obama has challenged retrograde Republicans, without taking a single potshot at them.

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A similarly elegant clarion call, adjusted for Ontario, would help differentiate Wynne from Andrea Horwath’s profligacy and, especially, Tim Hudak’s right-wing extremism. One wants more spending, the other savage cuts.

She must if she hopes to rebuild the coalition that Canadians have long been familiar with and which Obama successfully knitted together — women, minorities, the young, educated professionals, the struggling middle class, etc.

She is already on record as decrying the prevalent political discourse over “how we chase each other down to the bottom.”

There’s a strong body of informed opinion that “inequality stifles, restrains and holds back growth,” as Nobel-winning American economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote recently in the New York Times.

Wynne has summed up her twin goals well: “I’d like to be known as the social justice premier. Fiscal responsibility is the means to it.”

While she has started to spell out the first part of the equation — increasing welfare rates, for example — she has yet to say how she’d balance the books by 2017.

Ontario has not had an honest public debate over how to deal with the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector because of globalization and the weakened American economy; how to address high unemployment while employers are crying for high skilled labour; how to end the exploitation of immigrants and the young, the former paid low wages and the latter kept on non-paying internships; how to grow government revenues; and what Ontarians can or cannot afford by way of public services, especially medicare.

We’ve heard generalities aplenty — create hi-tech jobs, bring more skilled immigrants, make government smaller, etc. — but few specifics, and little or nothing on how to reset the big jigsaw puzzle.

The longer we delay that discussion, the more we empower populist demagogues. The antidote to the politics of resentment and the demonization of the vulnerable is to build public consensus that there’s no silver bullet.

Wynne is good at initiating difficult conversations, as she demonstrated at the convention:

“I want to put something on the table. Is Ontario ready for a gay premier? You’ve all heard that question.” She proceeded to provide the eloquent answer that won her widespread plaudits.

After winning the leadership and being on her way to becoming the first Torontonian to be premier, she told cheering delegates: “Let’s get this Toronto thing out of the way. I’m going to be premier for all of Ontario.”

She held an intimate conversation with the more than 1,300 people in the old Maple Leaf Gardens. That’s not possible when your throne speech is to be read formally in the legislature by the lieutenant-governor.

Best to have David Onley convey a clear vision, stated modestly (“your government hopes to do this and that”), extend a hand to the opposition (“partisanship is integral to democracy but members of this House are adversaries, not enemies”), and invite Ontarians to join a frank debate on how best to balance competing forces for our common good at this difficult time.

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